Ballistic (A Vigilantes Novel)

by Keri Lake

  I stood watching him, as he kept on down the sidewalk, occasionally glancing back with that questionable smugness plastered on his lips.

  Something told me I was in for a serious hankering to kill someone before the end of the night.

  Pushing through the front door set me standing in an empty foyer, no less abandoned in appearance, with its decaying wood and peeling curls of paint. Broken furniture, and what must’ve once been the concierge desk, lay toppled and ruined. Papers and grime plastered the floor, just like in every other abandoned shithole in the city. Only it wasn’t like any other. I’d already seen the evidence of that skipping his happy ass down the front stairs a moment ago.

  The abandonment gave it anonymity, concealing what I suspected was going to be some really bad shit.

  A dark and ominous hallway stood before me, and I strode forward, boots crunching against the broken glass scattered across the floor. Hairs on my neck stood high. I didn’t want to see what lay on the other end of the corridor, but that was the shit thing of it, why so many places like that one existed—no one wanted to see. Only those brave enough to open their eyes could put a stop to it, but I’d be lying if my guts weren’t telling me to get the fuck out of there.

  It’d been a couple years since I’d lost Livvie, but finding out how she’d died, seeing it play out on some fucked-up video, would stay with me forever. It’d messed with my head so much, I’d gone in search of a total stranger, putting myself in the crosshairs of one of the city’s most notorious criminals.

  I arrived at a door, and the moment I knocked, a small square peephole door slid to the side, the light from within slicing the surrounding darkness. No word spoken. No instruction, at all.

  I warily slid my tattooed wrist through the hole, and something rough and abrasive scratched against my skin. I clenched my jaw as the burn fanned out from where the tattoo sat on my forearm. The second I slid my arm back out of the hole, the door opened, showing a large, obese man sitting on a small stool—a sight that would’ve been humorous, if not for the anxiety muddling my head. A tiny anteroom, like a coat check at one time, muffled the sounds faintly bleeding through the door ahead of me.

  Staring off, I held my arms up while the guy performed a quick pat-down.

  Something jabbed my arm, and I looked down to see a white mask dangling from the bouncer’s fingers. He didn’t bother waiting for me to slip it on, before he opened the second door and stepped aside for me to pass through.

  That was when I noticed everyone wore the masks, except for the strikingly young girls walking around in bondage wear. One must’ve only been seventeen, standing alongside a husky figure in a suit and tie. She wore a leather under-bust corset, with a strap that climbed up between her bared breasts to a cuff attached around her throat. Two cuffs at her wrists had been attached to small chains fixed to either side of the corset, limiting her movement. Another strap hardly covered her front bits, leaving a small patch of hair peeking out from either side.

  A second girl, maybe slightly older than the first, set her hand on the arm of another man, her getup similar to the other girl’s, aside from an O-ring gag and nipple clamps.

  Must’ve been a dozen girls walking around, while the men sat fondling them, or interacting with each other. Some wore suits, while others wore more casual clothes, like mine.

  Muscles keening with tension, I slid the mask on for anonymity, in the event I ended up killing one of the other disguised motherfuckers by accident.

  The room beyond opened up to what I guessed had been a banquet hall, in its time. Slightly more restored than the lobby of the place, the walls had been painted black with silver accents all throughout. Silver trim, silver sconces, and small silver tables and chairs, closing me into a small cage, as I stepped inside.

  Making my way toward the bar, I breathed hard through the mask, a piss poor effort to calm the storm brewing inside of me. Felt claustrophobic all of a sudden. I needed a drink before I risked doing something stupid.

  The bartender strolled up with a rag in his palm, which he used to wipe down the bar’s surface. “What can I get ya?”

  “Whiskey. Double-shot.” The words beat against the plastic covering my face, and I wondered if he could hear the wobble in my voice as I started to lose my shit.

  “You got it, my man.”

  While he poured the double, I looked around the room again. How the fuck would I find the asshole, particularly as I didn’t know his face, even if I could see it? I lifted the mask just enough to tip back the shot, letting the burn kill the string of curses trapped in my throat.

  At the brush of something soft against my arm, I turned to find what had to be the youngest girl in the place. Bile rose up in my throat, while a twinge of panic shot it back down. I’d have been surprised if she was twelve, walking around in tight, black, boy shorts and a top that cut down to her stomach. I wanted to remove my jacket and cover her up, take her out of the shithole, but I fought the urge prodding at my muscles.

  Patience.

  “Wanna hook up?” Her slight voice matched the shame in her eyes, and the way she looked away told me she wasn’t prepared for the rejection she was about to get hit with.

  I couldn’t even look at her without wanting to stab the shit out of every cocksucker in the place.

  How the hell did a young girl like that end up there? A runaway? Did they swipe her up from her family? She go willingly?

  I scanned down to the skinny metal band, so tight around her wrist, it almost seemed fused within her skin. A circular silver object, attached like a charm, had a plastic face that looked like a digital watch. “What’s that?” I asked, ignoring her question from before and trying to keep my eyes on her face instead of the outfit that put her too-small breasts on display. Not as bad as the BDSM suits, but not what I’d call better, either.

  My skin crawled with the encounter, and even if my intentions were to track down and kill one of the assholes in the place, I felt dirty just being there.

  She glanced down and back to me. “GPS tracker. You’re new here, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah.” I turned slightly away from her, but not so much as to draw too much attention to what was becoming obvious. “First time.”

  Thankfully, she turned, too, hiding herself against the bar top. “I can tell. You look out of place.”

  “You know a Jasper? Comes here, sometimes?”

  With a trill chuckle, she shook her head. “You are new. Only the men call each other by name. We’re not allowed to ask.”

  Probably for the same reason the men wore the masks. Kept it all anonymous and impersonal. In case some bigwig politician, or some shit, showed up. Girls couldn’t identify them.

  My stomach spooled tight at the thought of the girl with some pig four times her age. I wanted to scoop her up and take her the fuck outta there. Get her cleaned up and bleach her brain of however many years she’d been subjected to that depraved hell. I couldn’t, though. Had to stick to the plan.

  “Look, you wanna hook up, or not? I have to meet my quota for the night, and you’re holding me up.”

  “Quota? How many?”

  “First tier is five. If I do more than that, I get a bonus.”

  A bonus? For letting a bunch of sick motherfuckers do whatever they wanted to her for the night?

  I could feel my chest tightening again, the muscles clamping down the way they did just before a fight. “Think I’m gonna have a couple drinks, thanks.”

  “Suit yourself.” She strode off, and the sudden ease of my muscles told me I’d been tense throughout the whole encounter. Three guys down from me, she sidled up next to a slim-built clown, whose grease-stained fingers told me he worked mechanics.

  My foster dad had been a mechanic, his fingernails constantly black, no matter how hard he’d scrubbed them. Always the last thing I’d see before he’d strike me across the face. He’d clocked me in the jaw once, and all I could smell was motor oil, over the coppery tang of blood in my mouth.<
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  The guy sized her up, eyes scanning through the mask, and when he touched one of her breasts, I had to look away to keep from throttling him.

  Black curls of smoke shifted behind my eyes as something dark and evil brewed inside me. It taunted me to grab my gun from the car and shoot up the place, starting with the fat fuck at the door. I breathed hard through my nose to calm the rage. In the mirror behind the liquor, I caught the reflection of a few men lined against the wall, their holsters sticking out from the waistbands of their pants.

  Couldn’t make a scene in the place. Not when all I had was a knife stuffed inside my boot.

  A body slammed into the bar beside me, and I twisted to see a guy wearing a mask, his wedding ring sunken into chubby fingers. “Hey, Griff, you see where Jasper went?”

  My ears piqued as a shot of victory swam like a school of wriggling goldfish through my veins.

  “Nah. Was just here with a girl a minute ago,” the bartender answered.

  “I run to take a piss, and the asshole leaves.”

  I spun around on the barstool, eyes skimming over the crowd. He’d be impossible to detect, but not her. At the entrance, a tall slim guy walked toward the door with the young girl at his side—a disgusting sight, the two of them. If not for the clothes, they’d have looked like a father and his young daughter walking off, the way he held her hand.

  I pushed through the crowd, eyes latched onto the two of them, as one of the rifle-strapped men, likely a guard, placed a gun-shaped object onto the band across her wrist and a red laser beam danced over the metal. A scanner of some sort.

  The two disappeared through the door.

  Someone’s hand brushed my arm. “Hey, wanna hook up?”

  Giving a dismissive wave, I kept on toward the exit. As I pushed through, the bouncer gripped my arm, and I paused, my muscles poised to draw back and pop the fat bastard in the nose.

  “Your mask. Gotta leave it.”

  Asshole.

  I peeled the mask from my face and tossed it to him, before pushing through the second door. I’d have to scrub the shit out of my skin later, knowing those things were probably shared amongst the men.

  A sliver of light cut through the darkness up ahead, signaling their exit out of the hotel, and I upped my pace to a light jog, following after them.

  No matter what, I couldn’t lose them.

  19

  Nicoleta

  I hated being alone in my thoughts. Particularly sober. My mother had always told me I overthought things as a child—looking into places I shouldn’t have, seeing things I shouldn’t have seen.

  Always defensive and wary of others.

  Don’t let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, but also trust in me, she’d say to me, as though she’d had any business asking for my trust.

  Cigarette half hanging out of my lips, I flipped through Dax’s wallet he’d left on the bathroom sink. About three hundred dollars in crisp bills thickened it, along with a few pictures of Luna. The fact that he’d left it told me he either didn’t care if I stole the money out of it, or trusted I wouldn’t. Either way, I couldn’t fathom putting that much faith into someone.

  After all, Dmitry had been like a father to me most of my life, and I still didn’t trust that he wouldn’t kill me if the mood struck him. He’d filled in the holes burned in my memories by the absence of my own father, and taught me things no regular parent had the courage to teach. Yet, the moment he’d gotten wind that the plans we’d made for Tesarik had taken a very selfish and one-sided turn, he’d quickly sought me out like a hound on a fox trail.

  If I’d returned to him, I’d have been punished for my betrayal, because even if the end result was the same, there was no I in his game. The idea that I would take matters into my own hands would be unacceptable to Dmitry. He wasn’t a man who tolerated betrayal. Particularly from those he’d trusted most.

  Marty, whom I’d come to know as the accountant, sat hunched over the books spread out across the small desk he’d been designated in Dmitry’s office. At the bigger desk across the room, Dmitry sat studying papers strewn all over the place, his face concentrated and focused.

  Moving around them, I busied myself with a feather duster, lightly brushing it over furniture that didn’t have much chance to collect dust, seeing as I’d dusted it the day before. Where I lived, dusting happened when I could write my name on the TV stand.

  Looking over the accountant’s shoulder, I noticed Marty working on the same spreadsheet as the day before. Pretty sure it was the same. I recognized the names, each with a dollar amount beside it, with the exception of one missing from the day before. The total at the bottom was off from the day before, too. Didn’t take a genius to figure the list was made up of men who owed him money, with all the numbers showing up green.

  With a glance back at me, Marty frowned, and twisted his computer screen until I could no longer see it.

  I kept along, dusting the bookshelf to the left of him.

  “Excuse me for a moment,” he announced, pushing up from his chair and flipping the screen down.

  “Make it quick.” Dmitry glanced up from a document he’d been reading. “I’m paying you by the hour to produce numbers, not to piss.”

  “Of course, sir.” Marty shuffled out of the office, since Dmitry refused to let anyone use his personal bathroom.

  “I think you’ve dusted enough in here, girl. Go on, find some other way to waste my time and money.”

  Asshole.

  With a smirk, I swiped the feathers over Marty’s coffee cup, smiling when bits of dust fell inside of it. “Think you need to pay more attention to your accountant.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “’The fuck did you say?” He pushed up from his chair and rounded the desk, setting my pulse rate soaring.

  I glanced to the computer beside me, and back to Dmitry, who didn’t look the least bit amused by my comment. “He’s skipping out on names. Yesterday, Jerrad Black was beneath Abdul Hemani. He wasn’t there this time.”

  Dmitry frowned and strode across the room to the small desk, where he lifted the screen to reveal the spreadsheet. He scrolled back and opened files with other dates, eyes scanning between them. His jaw ticced, and he slammed the screen shut and walked back to his desk in time to the door opening to Marty. The accountant adjusted his glasses, shuffling across the room with his gaze cast toward the floor.

  “Please excuse us,” Dmitry said to me, rolling his shoulders back.

  I caught a small flicker of confusion dance across Marty’s face, as I passed him to exit the office.

  I’d later learned that Marty had been skimming money off Dmitry for months, cutting deals with Jerrad Black on the side. I never saw Marty’s face in that office again, until it’d popped up on the news, when divers had fished his body out of the river. Jerrad Blacks had showed up sometime later, in a box full of dismembered body parts. And from that day on, Dmitry had me check every spreadsheet drafted by Marty’s replacement.

  He didn’t fuck around when it came to someone screwing him over, so I had no reason to believe that I’d be the exception.

  A faint buzzing noise peeled my attention toward the nightstand, and I crawled across to it. Opening the drawer revealed a box of Trojans, tucked alongside what I recognized as a burner phone. Dax must’ve had about four of them from what I’d seen. My eyes settled on the condoms first, wondering if they’d been there the whole time, or if Dax had purchased them. I lifted the burner from the drawer, staring down at a notification on the screen. The username was DaddyT-Rex.

  “Don’t be one of Dax’s profiles,” I muttered, opening the messages, but it appeared to belong to a man about forty-five years old.

  I scrolled up through the conversations that dated back three months, passing pictures the man had sent of his cock. At least, I assumed it was the stranger’s cock, all shriveled and purplish in color. No one would actually seek out a cock that ugly to send to
someone, surely.

  Dax’s responses, broken into abbreviated words, sounded like a child had written them. Demure and flirtatious, but not overtly so. Almost innocent. The other man spoke as if he were talking to a young child, too.

  I want to stick my dick in your butt. You’d enjoy it, I promise.

  Frowning, I scrolled higher. Seemed the conversation had begun months back. Dax had told the man he was twelve years old, from a broken home. The man had started out consoling him, as if he understood. According to the date stamped for each message, it’d only taken a couple weeks for the conversation to turn sexual.

  Jesus Christ, what the hell kind of fetish was that?

  The most recent message asked where he’d been. The man had begun to miss their conversations, as it seemed the last time Dax had corresponded was two weeks before he’d pulled me out of that storage unit.

  I clicked out of that message to a screen full of messages from different users. All men, it seemed. All of a sexual nature. All with accompanying photos, or short videos. In each case, Dax had claimed to be under fourteen years old.

  Had I gotten him wrong? He didn’t seem the type to role-play like that, nor did I get the impression he was gay. Which was cool with me—whatever floats your boat, but something about the exchanges just felt dirty and wrong. Very pedophilia, even if Dax wasn’t the young boy he’d pretended to be.

  It felt opposite to everything he’d made me believe about him.